Thursday, May 21, 2020

Series Binge Reading

The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION carries a regular column called "Plumage from Pegasus," by Paul Di Filippo, satirizing aspects of the writing life and the publishing industry. The article in the May-June 2020 issue, "Faster, Publisher! Binge! Binge!", imagines a near future in which the federal government has "outlawed serial fiction in all media, in response to its obvious debilitating effects." One exception, the trilogy (a "one tolkien" unit) is still legal, but that can't make a dent in the addictive cravings of the narrator, a self-confessed hopeless "codex-head." Piers Anthony's Xanth series lasts him only three weeks. He takes longer to get through the nearly 100 Perry Mason mysteries, but they don't last forever, nor do Enid Blyton's approximately 700 books. In desperation, he subjects himself to the ultimate hardcore aversion therapy regimen—reading the entire Perry Rhodan franchise in the original German.

All dedicated bookaholics probably identify with the thrill of discovering a new favorite author who has dozens or scores of books to read through. Some series can be read in any order, while others don't make sense that way. When I first got into the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, I didn't realize that, while many of the novels can be picked up at any point, the ones featuring Harriet Vane have a definite story arc. I read BUSMAN'S HONEYMOON (which begins with the marriage of Peter and Harriet) before the earlier books in the arc and was bewildered for the first chapter or so, because I had no idea who Harriet was. I read many of J. D. Robb's Eve Dallas futuristic mysteries out of order (until I caught up and began buying them upon release), which works for most of the books, although one gets more out of them by following the recurring characters from one story to the next. However, the first three novels, in which Eve meets and marries Roarke, really do need to be read first for optimal appreciation and just to avoid confusion. Fans of the Narnia novels disagree on whether they should be approached in internal chronological order or original publication order. Encountering Narnia for the first time in THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE offers an experience of discovery that's lost if one starts with the chronologically earlier THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW. Although the systematic side of my mind favors chronological order, I have to agree that for a first reading, publication order works best. In subsequent readings, I would start with THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW and insert THE HORSE AND HIS BOY in its proper place right after THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE.

The aforementioned Perry Mason books, from what I know of them, seem to stand alone in any order. So do the books in Agatha Christie's voluminous mystery canon, except that I'd advise postponing the final adventures of, respectively, Tommy and Tuppence, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple until you've become acquainted with those detective characters in a few earlier novels. After Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Study in Scarlet," which introduces Holmes and Watson, you can enjoy the Sherlock Holmes mysteries in any order, aside from the tales dealing with his "death" and return. As far as I can tell from memories of reading a few of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, those series can be dipped into at random, being written by ghostwriters under house pseudonyms and lacking any story arcs or character growth. On the other hand, the far better and undeservedly obscure Judy Bolton mysteries, by Margaret Sutton (a real person, who based the settings on the area in Pennsylvania where she lived), has characters who age from one installment to the next, graduate from school, and get married.

I recently decided to reread C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series. Discovering we didn't own all the novels, I ordered the missing volumes in secondhand copies. Then I had to wait for some of the gaps to be filled, because I want to read the books in internal chronological order. Like the Narnia series, however, they weren't published that way. The original Hornblower trilogy is set at the peak of his career, when he's captain of a ship of the line. The author later filled in the hero's life story with numerous prequels and sequels.

And then there's the frustration of discovering a publisher has allowed some earlier books in a series to go out of print. Thank goodness we now have easy access to out-of-print materials on the internet. How do you approach rereading a series? Do you follow it from start to finish or pick out favorite stories to savor?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Outsiders and Outliers

I'll be brief. Thanks to Les Stroud, aka Survivorman, (who --many years ago-- was gracious enough to write the cover quote for my alien-survival-romance Insufficient Mating Material), I discovered research "gold" today on YouTube.

Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpJcBozuF6A

Les Stroud, aka Survivorman, shows a wide variety of survival scenes in popular movies and points out what they did right, and what they got wrong. His insights are remarkable.

Seduced by the sidebar, intellectually speaking, I then "discovered" the fascinating Jonna Mendez, a CIA mistress of disguise, who walks viewers through a variety of action/spy movie clips, with commentary. Apparently, Tom Cruise got one of his Impossible Missions badly wrong, no matter how wonderful he looked in a long black dress. There are three professions that the secret services will never use as a disguise, and Jonna Mendez explains.

Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpJcBozuF6A

Former FBI agent Jim Clemente discusses how the FBI detects lying and deception. Topical, that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpJcBozuF6A

Apparently, most liars are caught because they don't lie with enough detail. Jim Clemente asks the sort of question that every would be author plotting a well-developed hero (or any other character) ought to ask and commit to note cards.

When nosing out the truth, a good agent cannot rely on myths, and short cuts. Just because I cover my mouth with my hand does not mean that I am a liar.... I might have bad teeth! (He did not say that.)

Another former FBI spy catcher and body language expert, Joe Navarro, explains how to read body language.

Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jwUXV4QaTw

As Romance authors, we know about the different stages of touching, from the first brush or shake of the hero's and heroine's hand. Joe Navarro explains how and why touching is important.... and if we are all doomed to never shake hands with a stranger again post Covid-19, at least we will know why we are missing what we are missing.

Finally, a real expert archer, Cameron Hanes, critiqued a selection of bow scenes, and gave particular props to  Legolas actor Orlando Bloom for his technique. Skip to frame 17.25, if extensive footage of bare chested John Rambo with bow and arrow is not your cup of tea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdipblQmgnw

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Mating Season

I enjoy watching the various "Planet Earth" series narrated by David Attenborough on the BBC America channel; I've seen bits of some of the episodes multiple times. A vital aspect of life on Earth, especially animal life, is, of course, producing the next generation. Mating and the care of offspring occupy a lot of footage on those programs. A constant viewer soon notices that most animals other than primates have fixed breeding seasons at particular set times. Once a year, for however long the process takes, all members of a given species enter the mating period. They all focus their total attention and energy on finding partners and producing offspring. For the rest of the year, they return to whatever constitutes "normal life" for their species, perhaps now with young to care for. It's striking to watch films of thousands of penguins or seals, for instance, crowding onto beaches for their annual mating rites. Some of them, such as penguins, practice lifelong monogamy, yet they engage in sexual activity only during that brief period.

Suppose a sapient species had a similar pattern, everybody in their society becoming fertile at once, all of them compelled to mate within a period of a few weeks or miss their chances to become parents? Wouldn't the entire society essentially shut down for that period, sort of like an extended Mardi Gras but with no sober police force or other authorities to keep the madness under control? The hermaphroditic humanoids in Ursula Le Guin's LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS go into "heat" for a few days every month, but they don't all enter that condition at the same time. How would an entire alien culture subject to an annual, universal breeding season handle it? Maybe people become infertile after a certain age, and the elders in their society have the responsibility to keep civilization running smoothly until citizens of reproductive age get back to normal. Would civilization as we know it have taken longer to evolve on that planet, with the yearly mating frenzy as a distraction?

In the opposite situation, some species have only one breeder or breeding couple in a group (e. g., bees, naked mole rats, wolves). An alien society with that reproductive pattern would presumably display none of the preoccupation with sexuality that drives so much of human law, custom, and emotional life.

Wildlife documentaries offer a wealth of information about exotic (to us) biological traits that could inspire alien species.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Theme-Story Integration Part 5 - How To Change Anyone's Mind

Theme-Story Integration
Part 5
How To Change Anyone's Mind

Previous parts in the Theme-Story Integration Series:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/04/theme-story-integration-part-1-villain.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/04/theme-story-integration-part-2-villain.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/04/theme-story-integration-part-3-sexy.html

Part 4 - Rag-Tag-Band Ensemble Story
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/05/theme-story-integration-part-4-rag-tag.html

To sell Hollywood a script, you have to master Character Arc -- how much change can a human exhibit under the impact of how small a prompting, and after how short an interval of "processing" the new information.

Humans are elastic, to be sure, but have limits.

To sell science fiction, you have to depict scientifically plausible rates of change (and some of the scientists reading your science fiction are psychiatrists, sociologists, specialists in human behavior).

To sell Romance, you have to depict humanly plausible reasons for initial "attraction" (or "repulsion.")  You have to show-don't-tell what she sees in him, and what he sees in her.

Here is What Does She See In Him?

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

The ability to "see" something in another person develops in the Teens, usually through those endless conversations parents have little patience with.  Seeing your own world through the eyes of another is a major breakthrough in maturation.

That is your starting point, when you realize that you understand where someone else is making a mistake.  "Don't date that guy. He's a loser."  And you try to change the other person's mind, change what they see -- usually, in the teen years, you try to change the other person's opinion without changing how they see, just what they see.

The assumption is that what you see is better, or more correct, than what the other person sees.

How do you change another person?

Many marriages start with the Neptune-fantasy induced idea that you can change the other person, rescue them from themselves, get them off drugs or whatever they are addicted to, alter their behavior.

It does work sometimes, but usually not for the reasons the marriage happened in the first place.  Most often such marriages end in divorce, which gives Romance writers the chance to explore the Second Time Around - where wisdom over-rides the urge to change another.

What you can do is change yourself to match the other person.

Find that a cringe-worthy idea?  Yeah, so do they!

But the truth is people change.  If people are too immature when they marry, and change-rates haven't settled down, they might grow toward each other, or might grow apart,  Apart usually leads to divorce.

Minds can be changed -- that is, the conclusions a person reaches can be questioned and discarded.  But how they reach those conclusions usually doesn't change after a certain level of maturity (reached at different ages).

The young/old couple pairing often gels nicely because the older person functions in a reliable manner, which relieves uncertainty, and stress for the younger who is still hunting for a thinking method.

We live in a world of professional (and well paid and well funded) mind-changers.

Profit seekers have weaponized psychological tricks for changing minds.

Can you get someone to love that which they currently hate?

Maybe.  Some people study this process for a living.

It is based on the assumption that what you are leading them to accept is better than what they currently accept.

Here is a 2019 non-fiction book detailing the results of many years of such well funded studies.

The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind Kindle Edition by Jonah Berg


https://www.amazon.com/Catalyst-How-Change-Anyones-Mind-ebook/dp/B07THCZ626/

Use these techniques, combined in different ways, and you can convince most readers that your Character is a real human being (or an Alien with enough in common with humans to make an excellent mate).

Today, people are accustomed to being targeted by these mind-altering weapons, and many ordinary people use them routinely.

Using this book as a checklist for making sure your Character doesn't arc to quickly, or too easily, or too slowly, to be believed will add verisimilitude to your Romance.

Now comes the thematic question of whether the user of these techniques is pristinely ethical -- or the blackest villain.

Who should be in charge of what others believe?  Teachers?  Children?  Authorities?

In Part 4 we looked STARS BEYOND...
https://amazon.com/Stars-Beyond-Uncharted-Book-ebook/dp/B07N5QJJFG/

...with an ensemble cast striving to survive in a world built on Genetic Modification for health and/or fun/art.  The Characters didn't arc - but their world did.

There was no thematic discussion (in show don't tell) of the issue of modifying another person on a basic level.  None of the conflicts involved who gets to say what you look like.  It was just, smoothly, assumed that in every case, the one being changed was totally in control of the outcome of their changes.

The one (intriguing) exception was when the Aliens saved a human's life by changing the eyes to a different visual spectrum, and incidentally and conveniently for them, changed linguistic center of the brain. Other humans, without objection, underwent the linguistic center modification.

Huge opportunities for conflict and resolution - for Character Arc and many other thematic discussions were overlooked, and I think it's because this gigantic story was compressed into one slender volume.

Here is the Theme-Character series, a jumping off place for constructing a Story Arc.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/07/index-to-theme-character-integration.html

Read STARS BEYOND and keep in mind the potential for applying the principles of "The Catalyst" to produce a long series of long novels which are all pure Romance.  Love Conquers All, but this novel is set after all the conquering so there is very little real conflict.  I think that's because they (the collaborators) started the story too late in the thematic arc.

Is it our genes that need modifying, or is it our minds?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Sunday, May 10, 2020

The Ignorance of Podcasters

Back in the heyday of MySpace, many authors (not this one), played current musical singles in full one their MySpace pages without paying any royalties and without seeking any kind of permission or license from the famous musicians.

MySpace, allegedly, made it possible to play John Legend (for example) on their pages, so site owners assumed that MySpace had the rights covered.

Maybe, if you are reading this and have a long-forgotten MySpace presence, you should check your old page and see if you still could be infringing a musician's rights.

Legal blogger, David Oxenford, for the Broadcast Law Blog has a couple of salutary posts that are well worth reading for podcasters and site owners.

https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2020/05/articles/the-basics-of-music-rights-for-webcasters-and-podcasters-a-webinar-at-world-audio-day/#page=1

And
https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2018/11/articles/podcaster-sued-for-copyright-infringement-for-using-music-without-permission-remember-ascap-bmi-and-sesac-licenses-dont-cover-all-the-rights-needed-for-podcasting/

As George Harrison sang with such prescience, but not with reference to authors and the need to create compelling and attractive promotions: "You Know It Don't Come Easy."

Meanwhile, authors on the internet should be cautious of gaining a following by saying mean things about others.
It's interesting to say mean things, of course, and may get one a following.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/alice-roosevelt-longworth/
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/09/sit-by-me/

But, as Charlie Smith wrote recently for Straight.com, defamation suits can be profitable for the defamed, especially in the truly English speaking world (that is, not in America!)
https://www.straight.com/tech/as-bc-billionaire-proceeds-with-lawsuit-against-twitter-google-loses-defamation-case-in

Also as City News Service reports:
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/mother-of-popular-youtube-personality-sues-instagram-account-owner-for-defamation/2349893/

Happy Mothers' Day!

Rowena Cherry 


Thursday, May 07, 2020

Urban Flight, Epidemics, and Demographic Change

In recent weeks, many people who can afford to do so have fled the congestion of cities for suburban, rural, or resort areas. Some such prized destinations have taken aggressive action to exclude non-residents:

Second Homes

It's being speculated that the flight from cities may lead to a permanent shift from urban to suburban living, for those who have the luxury of choice. The work-at-home trend may continue and accelerate after the present crisis ends. One commentator (see "Great American Migration" below) says, “You’ll still have urban centers. But they’ll be less intense and more dispersed. You’ll no longer have to choose between unaffordable, overcrowded cities and incredibly boring countryside. There will be a more attractive middle ground.”

Great American Migration

Other observers point out that the 1918 flu pandemic didn't cause the downfall of cities, and predictions that people would retreat from large urban centers after 9-11 didn't materialize. In fact, most cities have continued to gain population regardless of these and similar crises. Cities may have to adapt, but they aren't likely to empty:

Will the Pandemic Empty the Cities?

During the plagues of the past, people frightened of disease have often tried to escape the lethal overcrowding of cities. Boccaccio's 14th-century DECAMERON introduces a group of young, wealthy gentlemen and ladies who flee from the Black Death to a villa outside Florence. In antebellum New Orleans, upper-class families annually retreated from the city to country homes during "fever season." Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" portrays the gruesome fate of a prince who barricades himself and his cronies in his palace for a nonstop orgy while taking refuge from the titular epidemic.

As Arno Karlen explains in MAN AND MICROBES, his book on the evolution of infectious diseases from prehistory to the era of AIDS and Ebola, the phenomenon of epidemics began with the invention of agriculture and cities. Agriculture allowed the same land to support a much higher population than in hunter-gatherer or nomadic societies, but with negative trade-offs. People eating a monotonous diet of mostly grain tend to be less healthy than hunter-gatherers (as archaeology confirms). The resultant overall decline in health impairs the immune system. Moreover, by living in close quarters with domestic animals, they fall victim to animal diseases that mutate to prey on human hosts. With the growth of cities, for the first time in human history enough people lived together in a congested environment for epidemic diseases to flourish. Before modern sanitation and medicine, cities were deathtraps compared to the countryside (for the poor and working class at least).

We think of our contemporary world as being dominated by urbanization. Yet rural, agricultural communities still flourish, too. Herding and hunter-gatherer societies still exist, even if pushed to the margins by industrialization. Some people enjoy cutting-edge, high-tech conveniences and comforts, including smart houses, while others don't yet have indoor plumbing. This subject reminds me of a weakness in much SF that depicts contact with extrasolar planets. Too often, the alien world seems to have only one level of cultural and technological development that's uniform all over the planet, as well as one religion, a universal language, and, sometimes, a single ecology (the ice world, the desert world, the jungle world, etc.). Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover offers an example of doing it right; we see a variety of languages, climates, landscapes, and cultural customs on Darkover. Think of what different impressions of Earth extraterrestrial explorers would get if they landed in New York, Tokyo, Yellowstone Park, central Africa, the Australian outback, or northern Alaska and didn't bother to look any farther than their initial touchdown point.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, May 05, 2020

Theme-Story Integration Part 4 Rag-Tag-Band Ensemble Story

Theme-Story Integration
Part 4
Rag-Tag-Band Ensemble Story 

Previous parts in the Theme-Story Integration Series:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/04/theme-story-integration-part-1-villain.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/04/theme-story-integration-part-2-villain.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/04/theme-story-integration-part-3-sexy.html


Part 2 of this series ended off:

--------quote------

Only in children's stories or "comics" (not graphic novels) do people just suddenly, and without explanation or motivation, change into the opposite of what they've been seen to be in a plot-sequence.

So, bit by slow, detailed, bit at a time, you reveal the inner structure of your world that you built -- and make it clear how your world differs from everyday reality such that this "impossible" thing is possible.

In our Reality - "As the twig is bent; so grows the tree," is a true statement about human nature. Also the apple doesn't fall far from the tree is true of humans.

What is different about your World that makes those two statements about Human Nature false?

-----end quote------

Story-arc is the track, the because-line, parallel to Plot where Characters CHANGE because of the impact of events caused by their own decisions or actions -- or events they might never have noticed without some new level of insight triggered by an epiphany precipitated by a Plot Event.

Increased sensitivity to events is a Character Arc.

People do change, but it is rare.  More common is how people change their mind, their conclusions or opinions about something.

The "something" is derived from the Theme - the "change" is the Story.

How this can happen, when, where, why, with whom.

Without a Character Arc traced by a Story-line, a Plot just seems like a waste of time to read.

If an Arc is foreshadowed - something that could happen in a future volume, then the Arc can be the suspense-line in the Story.

All this is deep, abstract, and way too intellectual for simple entertainment.

Often people read to participate in a world where there are no coherent emotional pressures urging them to "Arc" in their own real-life world.

THE STARS BEYOND by S. K. Dunstall (the pen name for a writing team of two sisters who have written several books I enjoyed),



is an example of the "ensemble" cast, but because of the scope of the story - almost galaxy wide, many locations, many astrophysical oddities, plus an entire worldbuilding element about genetic manipulation, then adding brand new Aliens - there weren't enough pages in the book to delve into each point of view Character's Arc, Story, personal progress, and Relationships.

Each Character scintillates with possibilities, and none of them get a chance to grow before our eyes, to convince us we can become better people, and that Relationships are the key to that.  None of the Characters have enough space in the book to show-don't-tell us how LOVE CONQUERS ALL.

The book didn't set out to be a Romance.  There are Relationships, but mostly business-based, and maybe a little charity (or pity) tossed in on the side as people get their fannies caught in bear traps.

The bear traps (like losing a job, behind denied contracted bonuses) resolve way too easily, and all the main characters end up potential rich (due to a mineral discovery made because of a recovered memory.)

None of this is easy, and each step of the plot requires ferocious dedicated, disciplined, and risky actions by the Point of View Character used for a given chapter.

It paints a vast mural before our eyes, and it is a grand read.

But the "world" that is built of these pieces is more the hero of the story, not the Characters.  It is the "world" (galaxy-spanning-economy-based-on-gene-modification) that "arcs" -- this is the story of a civilization, not the individuals whose fates change that civilization's potential to survive and continue meddling with genes.

So far, there's nothing grotesque or cringe-worthy in the results of the gene modification professions.  There is a full blown healing application, but the rest is an art form that just lets individuals who can afford it become their fantasy selves.

None of the clients go into the gene-modification machines for love, or to reveal or actualize the reality of their Soul, or to venture onto planets hostile to human life.  Yet this volume introduces the potential (an unlivable planet with Aliens who also find it unlivable) for such modification.

Humans are modified, but so far there's no mention of modifying plants or food-animals to live on uninhabitable planets.

Gene modification has been strictly limited by lack of elemental resources that make it work.  The discovery made at the end of this volume teases future volumes about the impact on this disciplined civilization by unlimited access to such a natural resource.

So far, with all the male and female characters in the story, I don't see the foreshadowing of a true Romance, but this Series really needs one volume that tracks the Character Arcs of a pair becoming mates by being changed.

So writers should ponder human civilization, in whatever epoch you want to write in, and figure out the mechanism that lets one human "change" another human's mind, heart, soul -- opinions.

Part 5 of this series makes a suggestion.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Sunday, May 03, 2020

What You Don't See (May Bind You)

First there was the "fine print"; then there was the probably intentionally mind-numbing scroll of all caps print, page after page of it; then, there were sites such as EBay that forced you to join their club and agree to all their Terms (which of course meant that you held them harmless) before you could defend your copyrights; now --perhaps-- you have to agree to THE TERMS before you can read them.

Perhaps I misread this from Peloton to musicians:
"Click HERE to log into your MusicReports.com account and review the proposed license agreement. If it is acceptable to you, simply check the box to confirm you have read the agreement, then click the “I Agree” button to accept the terms. You can then download a full copy of the agreement from the “My Licenses” page in your account."

Credits to
https://thetrichordist.com/2020/04/16/is-musicreports-license-pitch-for-onepeloton-the-equivalent-of-a-poor-persons-class-action-settlement-without-court-supervision/

The tentacles of Mark Zuckerberg reach into your portfolio, and lift your copyrights, and there is nothing you can do about the filching of your photographic rights if you post a picture on Instagram.

"A New York federal district court has dismissed a photographer’s copyright infringement claims after finding that the photographer gave Instagram the right to sublicense her photograph to the accused infringer, Mashable, Inc. Mashable used the photograph at issue on its site by embedding a link to an Instagram post published on the photographer’s public Instagram profile. In Sinclair v. Ziff Davis, the court decided that, by including the photograph in a post on her public Instagram profile, the photographer had..." 

... unintentionally given Instagram a legal license to "share" her intellectual property.

Legal bloggers David W. Holt and Ryan J. Letson, writing for the law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP, discuss the unsuccessful copyright infringement complaint by the photographer, Stephanie Sinclair, against Mashable Inc.
https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2020/04/looking-for-likes-social-media-post-results-in-unintended-license-to-share-photograph

They offer great constructive advice, but the bottom line is "User Beware".

Legal bloggers Radhika K. Raman and  Jeff Van Hoosear examines the perils of snagging someone else's photograph, even if the photo is of oneself.
https://www.knobbe.com/blog/its-photo-me-celebrities-face-legal-action-unauthorized-use-images-social-media

"Social media managers, celebrities, and individuals alike should exercise caution before posting photos online for which they do not own the copyright rights. Often, a simple source attribution, or a small licensing fee, can save months of legal trouble later. While many disagree with the public policy or reasoning prohibiting celebrities from re-sharing photos of themselves..."

OR, find the photo on Instagram, and embed the link.


Mark Sableman says as much about the same Sinclair/Mashable disagreement, in his legal blog for Thomson Coburn LLP"It's not infringing if it's an authorized embedding."

https://www.thompsoncoburn.com/insights/blogs/in-focus/post/2020-04-17/it-s-not-infringing-if-it-s-an-authorized-embedding#page=1

Or
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=139cc166-c3d8-49c8-add3-1a39725d7d2d

Facebook also, somehow, can snag Zoom users' information, even if the Zoom users don't have a Facebook account, or so it is alleged, and reported by legal bloggers for Troutman Sanders LLP Anne-Marie Dao, Wynter L. Deagle, and  Yarazel Mejorado.

Allegations include:

"Zoom sending data from users of its iOS app to Facebook for advertising persons [sic], even if the user does not have a Facebook account; The Windows version of Zoom being vulnerable to attackers who could send malicious links to users’ chat interfaces and gain access to their network credentials; Zoom not requiring a user’s consent before allowing the host of the meeting to record the session; The presence of a security flaw that would enable hackers to take over a user’s Mac..."

There are some precautions that Zoom users can take.  Read more on Linked In:

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=013b92f2-4b1e-4dc9-89f4-8d78c3785a27&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email+-+Body+-+General+section&utm_campaign=Lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2020-04-27&utm_term=

Or on the Troutman blog:
https://www.troutman.com/insights/to-zoom-or-not-to-zoomprivacy-and-cybersecurity-challenges.html


Legal bloggers Warwick Andersen, Cameron Abbott, Rob Pulham, Allison Wallace and Max Evans collectively point out not only that some have alleged that Zoom's Privacy Policy does not disclose its leaks of users' data to Facebook but also that Windows users' passwords may be snagged.

Original link:
https://www.cyberwatchaustralia.com/2020/04/zooming-in-zooms-significant-privacy-and-data-security-risks-brought-to-light-again-and-again/

Lexology link:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=3b6d57ff-bfb4-402d-9e66-9dd03f2d8513&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email&utm_campaign=Lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2020-04-17&utm_term=

So, even if you do everything right, and read all the "agreements" and "terms" and "policies" before joining someone else's Zoom meeting as an invited guest, your privacy and more is still likely to be violated.


It's more a case of seller beware (rather than caveat emptor) when it comes to Amazon. The Authors Guild provides a  perspective on Bezos behaving badly towards publishers and authors.
https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/amazons-anticompetitive-history/

And CopyrightAlliance continues to fulminate against immense copyright infringers and the senator who shields them.
https://copyrightalliance.org/news-events/copyright-news-newsletters/internet-archive-emergency-library-harms-authors/?_zs=TqSBb&_zl=5fF52


All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Joanna Russ on Feminism and SF

I've been rereading TO WRITE LIKE A WOMAN: ESSAYS IN FEMINISM AND SCIENCE FICTION, by Joanna Russ. Although released in 1995, it contains many essays published earlier, as far back as the 1970s. It's still available new on Amazon, and you can view the table of contents with the "Look Inside" feature:

To Write Like a Woman

Of particular interest in reading these older works is noting how the image of women in popular fiction has changed since the 70s—as well as recognizing some problems that linger on to the present day. We can hope we've moved beyond the status quo described in "What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write" (1972), in which Russ argues that most of the plot and character archetypes familiar in novels written by and for men don't apply to female characters. An outcome defined as success for a man constitutes failure for a woman. A fictional woman (like career women in real life, at least at the time the essay was written) is apt to find herself stuck in a classic double bind; if she strives to fulfill her ambitions and actually succeeds, she's condemned as "unfeminine," but if she behaves the way a woman is traditionally expected to, she's viewed as weak. Consider how the history of "Alexandra the Great" would read. A female character in male-oriented fiction tends to fall into stereotypical categories such as the Bitch Goddess and the Maiden Victim. She can act as a protagonist in only one kind of story, a love story. Three principal genres are exceptions, according to Russ, giving characters true agency regardless of gender—mystery, horror, and especially science fiction.

Other essays of special interest are two pieces about all-women or women-dominated societies. "Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction" (1980) surveys a batch of stories about such societies, written by men. It's amazing how silly most of them sound. Typically, the basic self-contradiction in those dystopias, which embody masculine fears about being dominated by females (in these tales, giving women equality always leads to feminine tyranny), is that women are portrayed as so powerful they can crush men completely (aside from the hero, of course), yet so weak they can be subdued and enlightened by "real" sex or even a passionate kiss. Numerous counter-examples appear in "Recent Feminist Utopias," which analyzes a selection of more nuanced, humane female-dominated societies, all but one written by women. Russ includes Marion Zimmer Bradley's THE SHATTERED CHAIN, presenting the Free Amazon subculture as one such society, even though it's embedded in the patriarchal culture of Darkover as a whole. I would have liked to see a discussion of Bradley's true feminist utopian novel, THE RUINS OF ISIS, but perhaps it hadn't been published at the time of this article.

The first three essays in the book examine science fiction as a genre and try to construct a working definition of its "aesthetic." "Someone's Trying to Kill Me, and I Think It's My Husband" provocatively analyzes the paperback Gothics so popular in the 1960s and 70s. The other pieces range over a variety of topics, including a merciless dissection of the film version of Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog." Despite the age of the material in this collection, it remains fascinating, thought-provoking, and relevant to the current status of the field. Also recommended: Russ's incisive work HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING. ("She didn't write it"; "She wrote it, but she had help"; "She wrote it, but look WHAT she wrote"; etc.)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Theme-Conflict Integration Part 7 - Romance Without Borders

Theme-Conflict Integration
Part 7
Romance Without Borders

Previous parts in Theme-Conflict Integration are indexed at:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/05/index-to-theme-conflict-integration.html

Romance, just like Science Fiction, is a genre without borders -- there is literally no story that can be told that won't be improved by adding Science and scientific thinking to a Character, and likewise, there is no story that won't be improved by Romance.

We all know what Romance is.  It is what we love to read.

And as with science fiction, thousands have tried to describe what makes a Romance novel a Romance novel -- has anyone actually succeeded and defining this human experience?

Is there anyone who can define happiness?  What is the formula for a good life?  How do you choose a mate?  By how you FEEL?  By who your parents approve of?  By whose parents your parents approve of?

Arranged marriages, usually about property, heritage, Royal Titles, or settling ancestral feuds (or wars), can actually be about the Parental generation observing details about the young adults to find which personalities blend with least friction.

Arranged marriages can be successful when the elders doing the arranging are able to see, and understand what they are seeing, the youngsters from a perspective the youngsters don't know exists.

Look around this world of today, and you will find few, very few, elders who have any idea what the marriage-age generation is about.

It's called a generation-gap for a reason.  There is simply no connection or contact across that gap because of the way young people's brains develop to process information.

This, of course, starts in infancy, or maybe even before birth, as the human brain its very plastic.  Yes, it changes a lot through experience of the world, and keeps on changing far longer than science used to believe.

So let us postulate that Romance, and the potential to experience true Romance, the potential to recognize a Soul Mate (even in an Alien from another planet), the potential to bond firmly with a mate chosen by Older And Wiser matchmakers, is rooted in the experiences of infancy.

Infancy is the root of the ability to fall in love?

Or possibly infancy is where we learn there is no such thing as a Happily Ever After.

In infancy, we experience the passage of time as a percentage of all the time we have been aware.

Thus the second day of life is 50% of all existence.

By the time a person is 20 years old, you have lived 7,300 days, so a day is about 0.01 percent of your life.

As you get older, the percent of your life that a day represents gets smaller, so the Events of a day become less and less significant.  You have good days.  You have bad days.  Nothing wallops you over backwards if it lasts only 1 day.  The things that matter are the things that have long-range (years) consequences.

So the experiences of the world that have the longest range consequences happen in infancy, toddlerhood, and yes the angst of the teen years.

A Matchmaker who knows the business will be able to match 20 year olds with a good mate for a solid marriage, a marriage that will end in Romance, not begin there.

But to pull this off, and it is chancy, the Matchmaker has to remember how the parents of the 20-year-olds were treated as infants, and how the twenty-somethings were treated by those parents all their lives.

And the Matchmaker has to know a lot of people, their biographies, and how they turned out, and what they went on to do after having their kids.  The successful matchmaker has to understand life-long trajectories, the business of living a good life.

This was possible when we all lived in villages small enough that everyone knew everyone, that children went into the same profession as the parents (blacksmithing, farming, trading, weaving, tanning, etc) or were apprenticed out to a better profession.

That much information just isn't available today, three generations into a highly mobile world where family ties to neighborhoods were broken as corporations moved workers around the country.  You had to move your family to climb the executive ladder.

Nobody, at that time, was thinking of that process in terms of how it would affect the eventual ability to experience Romance.

Let's theorize that it did.

Would that explain why we have about half the world convinced there is no such thing as a Happily Ever After in real life?

Children whose significant Relationships, at 3, 5, 10, even 14 years of age are broken may be traumatized (brain development issue, more than just emotional) in such a way that their Character is scarred.  Scars, physical scars on the skin, heal, and even disappear with the decades, so it is possible scars on the brain could likewise become invisible.

Skin scarring does retrain insensitivity for years after it becomes invisible, but healing can happen with enough time.

The brain is likewise pliable, responding to environment and experience.

Today's children are being raised "online" -- and I know some, personally, whose dear friends from Elementary School have moved away, but maintain contact via FACETIME or video-chat of some sort -- and yes, Facebook or other chat platforms.

In the 1940's only the relatively affluent had telephones at home, but by the 1950's it was common for a house or apartment to have ONE telephone.

The classic joke of the 1950's and 1960's was how Teens monopolized the single phone line (even or especially if there were "extensions" in the house) just talking snd talking to their friends about what seemed to the parents to be nothing at all important.

It was only the affluent who had extensions, and most phones were on a short wire attached to the wall.  That phone line had to be kept open for incoming "important" calls the parents wanted to be available for.

Long distance phone calls were massively expensive.

So if a child's friend moved away, to another state for example, ALL TIES were broken.

Today, even lower income households have dumb phones, if not smart phones.  But penetration is in full swing, and in 20 years or less, everyone will have a wider world to live in.

WITHOUT BORDERS is the way to think of the current generation gap.

Humans experience the "freedom" of living without borders, without having to re-establish credentials and licenses for professions (Nursing, M.D.'s, Electricians, Plumbers, Teachers, etc) by passing state tests each time you move, as a wonderful thing.

Humans experience the freedom of leaving home for college as a wonderful thing.

Humans experience the freedom of getting a driver's license and being able to borrow a parent's car as a wonderful thing.

Freedom - the ability to transgress boundaries without adverse consequences - is treasured by humans.

Happily Ever After without FREEDOM is Misery Ever After.

But Freedom is dangerous.  Give a 3 year old freedom, and he'll run out in the street and get run over, or drown in the backyard pool, or fall down a Well, or get stuck in a storm drain.  It happens.

Freedom is dangerous, but it is essential to the Happily Ever After goal.

Managing risk is the skill-set parents have to start teaching their infants on day two of life.  The mother's hands holding and feeding the newborn start the process of configuring the brain to get what you want/need within the risk-borders best chosen for the situation.

As with all primates, humans learn to parent by being parented.  How those mother's hands hold the newborn begins the process of acquiring the ability to parent.

It is a long process of acquisition and is accompanied by many other skill-sets being acquired.

But it is the parent's influence on the newborn that the matchmaker has to know.

Today, only God knows.

The chain of parenting culture/habits/practices has been broken -- in the early 1900's by the advent of experts writing books on how to parent, and in the early 2000's by the advent of email (OK, programming the VCR became the joke of the 1990's) and other online activities.  Children could do things their parents could not learn to do no matter how hard they tried.

It has always, throughout human history, been the opposite -- parents with years of experience could do things the children could only hope to master some day.

Thus we have a generation of parents who, as children long ago, escaped the "limits" -- the borders of discipline, their parents set for them.

Romeo and Juliet enshrined the archetype of children associating with people their parents disapproved of.

Children always hate, resent, and expend enormous energy beating at these borders parents put around them.

Look at the 1 year old who stands up in his crib and falls out.  Look at the 10 year old who runs away from home.  We all spend our formative years trying to escape.

Kids do that. Parents remember being like that, seeing the world as a trap, and like cows in a pasture, pushing toward the greener grass on the other side of that fence.

Parenting fashions have begun to change rapidly in the last century, as what children are capable of doing has expanded (but common sense acquisition has not), so we have new books on "how to" parent coming out every decade or two, with conflicting advice based on science.

The parents (and grand-parents) who weren't parented with strict boundaries, physical borders, psychological and sociological limits, are now raising children.  These new parents may know, but not have personal feelings and memories for, living within strict boundaries, and trusting their parents to set those boundaries appropriately.

The parenting process that might be producing the skepticism about the Happily Ever After lifestyle goal is the process of delineating borders.

Parental border setting is all about "controlling" who your child associates with.

As infants, we learn to recognize Mother's face, Father's face, and then others who provide and handle us, feed us, change diapers, put us in a playpen, allow this but not that behavior.

As we grow, our circle of recognition grows.

Good parenting consists of observing this particular child's growing ability to form and hold associations, and carefully enlarging the circle of acquaintances, managing the establishing of friends (these days through "play dates,") and adding people from this type of household but not that type.

By High School, children should have acquired the ability to assess the risks of this or that Relationship, and to understand their own sensitivity to risk, their ability to tolerate emotional impacts that come inevitably from having friends.

The problems today come at least partly from the parent's inability to teach these skills.

They can't teach them for two main reasons: A) they weren't taught, B) what they were taught, and what they learned, aren't relevant to the world today's children live in.

The generation gap caused by technology has ripped apart the parent-child relationship.

In families where that has happened, you will see a rising percentage of people who just can't see happiness as anything stable, long term.

Humans yearn for long-term as much as for freedom, so the trend will reverse.  Currently, your prime readership for Romance (teens-twenties) may be in the stage of being unable to form long-term Relationships, so "Happily" means something, but "Ever After" just does not.

Being dependent or having dependents is not a "happy" situation from the point of view of a young person who grew up as a single child, or maybe just two, possibly in a one-parent situation.  The view of life, of what it can and should be, that children with 7 or 10 siblings have is very different.  Happiness is a noisy mob, and freedom is running with that noisy mob faster than Mom can capture you.

Children raised in a noisy mob generally have parents who have many siblings, so aunts, uncles, cousins form an even noisier mob, and happiness is having them over as company -- or being over to their house to play with more cousins.

The point of getting married is to create a new noisy mob.

Children raised in a noisy mob start infancy with a much larger circle of intimates, and learn to deal with compatible and abrasive personalities very early in life.  Such children will have less trauma dealing with an ever growing circle of acquaintances, greater resistance to bullying, more tools for creating social harmony.

Today, families have shrunk, so even three generations back children don't have the noisy mob of uncles and cousins.  Where they do exist, often families just aren't in touch because they long ago moved to different places, even countries.

The parenting skill of allowing a child's number of associating children to grow at the rate that child needs is no longer being transmitted in the majority population.  For the Romance writer, this means the potential readership is thirsting for a vision of life with those skills.

Think about the popularity of the T V Series THE BRADY BUNCH.  Or consider the Cop-Family depicted in the TV Series, BLUE BLOODS (2019-2020 season is #10 in this family gritty drama series).

Or think about the work-family formed at the core of TV Series like NCIS or BONES, or the much older Series, THE WALTONS or LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE.

There is an audience hungering for broad group-dynamic Relationship stories -- maybe because families have shrunk and humans prefer larger families?

Romance readers will be wanting stories about large families where, right before our eyes, humans learn the art of conflict resolution via close, personal, intimate relationships that are not romantic (e.g. siblings, cousins).

It is in the larger family dynamic that humans master the tools of conflict resolution, or perhaps even conflict generation.  Ask yourself what is the optimum family size for humans -- then explore what the reproductive dynamic of your Alien species would dictate for their early life acculturation.

Themes involving deep, personal, unique and individual Relationships easily embrace the problems of having many siblings.  Humans compete with siblings (gotta kill that kid brother!) -- but do your Aliens?

Parents try to police that sibling rivalry, but do they know how if they had no siblings?

Many of the Conflicts that drive humans out into the workplace, and hurl them into love affairs, originate in early life, even infancy and toddlerhood.

The borders we internalize as our parents enlarge our circle of acquaintances, how to behave toward a friend, how to fend off attacks from an aggressor, how to accept, how to reject, how to know when to do which, are the foundation off all subsequent Romance.

How a child responds to being "socialized" with these borders around behavior shows the Matchmaker what groups to look at to find the Soul Mate.

That's what Matchmakers are supposed to do - find the Soul Mate and introduce them.

A brief introduction is all that's necessary when a Relationship can "click."

Sometimes that Soul Mate just isn't alive to be found, and then the Matchmaker's job is to find another bereft lonesome who can blend easily into a Happily Ever After life for the couple.

It can be done.  It has routinely been done throughout human history.  But today the shattered family structure has prevented the nurturing of the Matchmaker skill sets.

The internet, live video-chat, and other tools may heal the extended family and shift the cultural matrix toward the more stable "village" of associations.

In a thousand years, humanity may look back on this shattered-family period as a difficult aberration in the human search for peace.

Do we have to wait that long to open hailing frequencies with Aliens?  Are they waiting?  Or are they already here?

If an Alien was adopted into a large human family, what inevitable conflicts would develop?

THEME: humans are innately combative, competitive and hostile to anyone "different."

THEME: humans are innately gentle, curious, and loving toward all, but the animal body striving to survive in a hostile world warps these innate tendencies toward hating that which is different.

THEME: love can free such a warped human psyche to roam beyond the torturous internal borders adopted for survival.

All three of these themes can generate Romance Novels - but they are especially suited to the Second Time Around Romance, as the more mature Characters have relevant backstory that shapes their conflicts, internal and external.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Saturday, April 25, 2020

National ? "Emergency"?? Library???

The Authors Guild is asking all comers to sign a petition.
Link:
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/sign-our-open-letter-to-internet-archive-to-shut-down-the-so-called-national-emergency-library?source=direct_link&

Here's what you can expect to see:



The excessive punctuation is mine. I apologize.

For authors, it would probably be quite effective and legitimate to use the comments box to name ones titles that have been pirated on this site.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Sex Lives of Animals

I've been rereading DR. TATIANA'S SEX ADVICE TO ALL CREATION, by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson. As the title implies, the book is formatted like an advice-to-the-lovelorn column, with each inquiring letter from a perplexed organism used as the springboard for discussion of similar behavior in a wide range of species. The lively explorations of often bizarre sexual customs are supported by twenty-four pages of notes and an extensive bibliography. Not only are the descriptions entertaining in themselves, they delve into the reasons why evolution produced such behaviors and how they promote the survival of the species. The mating habits of "lower" animals could spark fascinatingly strange ideas for alien biology.

Suppose sentient species on other worlds shared some of those bizarre (to us) customs. If the male typically gets eaten during copulation and contentedly accepts this fate in order to nourish his beloved and their children, maybe a network of rituals would grow up around the process of his offering himself to be consumed. Maybe males would compete to become plump and nutritious. Imagine an intelligent species in which the newly hatched infants always eat their mother's body, as with some spiders. Their society would have to include a caste of caretakers and educators to bring up the young. Almost nobody would have a living mother, and the rare female who selfishly refused to let herself be devoured would be ostracized. Maybe a females' rights movement would develop an artificial infant food source to liberate mothers from inevitable death, so they could lead long, productive lives. Hive insects such as bees, of course, are dominated by females with few males, whose function is limited to mating, but among the females only the queen breeds. Terry Pratchett's Nac Mac Feegle, diminutive but bellicose fairy folk, live in a similar colony, except that the queen (or "kelda") is the only female, married to one of the males and sister-in-law or mother to all the rest.

There's a marine worm that can change its sex repeatedly throughout its lifetime. The switch depends on the size and sex of the worm's partner. When a pair stays together long-term, both eventually become hermaphrodites. Ursula Le Guin's LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS features a world where people shift between male and female depending on the random chance of which sex their current mate happens to become that month. The difference from the transsexual marine worm is that Le Guin's aliens revert to neuter for most of each month. She devised this reproductive system as a thought experiment on how a society without sex differences would work. A few Earth creatures start out as females and later transform into males; the Martians in Heinlein's RED PLANET and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND have this kind of life cycle. One category of organisms, slime molds and green algae among them, may have hundreds of sexes. That doesn't mean five hundred of them need to get together to produce offspring. It means each sex cell is genetically distinct from the other kinds, and there are rules as to which can pair up. The social functions of reproduction and parenting would look very different in a slime mold society from the way they work in ours. In the more conventional male and female pairings we're familiar with, imagine an intelligent species reproductively similar to seahorses, in which the male gestates and gives "birth" to the young. Or suppose we were like certain bats whose males as well as females secrete milk to feed their offspring. Either of those species would probably have a society where females, not being biologically tied down to child care, could enjoy much more independence than in traditional Earth cultures. What about a world of women who reproduce by parthenogenesis, as some animals are capable of doing? All-female societies reproducing parthenogenetically have often appeared in science fiction, such as the world of Whileaway in Joanna Russ's THE FEMALE MAN and the post-apocalyptic setting of Suzy McKee Charnas's MOTHERLINES.

Here's a page that gives an overview of numerous examples of odd animal reproductive behavior, with lots of links:

The Sex Lives of Animals

Nonhuman animals have been found to engage in just about any unusual or "perverted" human sexual practice you can think of, including bestiality (copulating with a member of an unrelated species) and necrophilia. Those two habits, as the article points out, must be simply mistakes in evolutionary terms, since they can't result in reproduction. According to DR. TATIANA'S SEX ADVICE, however, the most deviant sexual custom of all, judging by its rarity is—monogamy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

How to Use Tarot and Astrology in Science Fiction Part 7 - Creating Charisma with Verisimilitude

How to Use Tarot and Astrology in Science Fiction
Part 7
Creating Charisma with Verisimilitude 

Previous parts in How to Use Tarot and Astrology in Science Fiction Series are indexed at the bottom of the index post about Astrology

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html

The Tarot posts - Tarot Just For Writers - have been polished up and presented as Kindle books. 5 Individual volumes, or one single collected one (the collected is cheaper).

https://amazon.com/Not-So-Minor-Arcana-Books-ebook/dp/B010E4WAOU/

And we have explored Verisimilitude in the various aspects of Worldbuilding, Theme, Plot, and even Marketing.  Seeming "real" at least in some single element, is a novel's most memorable feature.  One "realistic" element can make the imaginary elements vivid, real, fascinating, and memorable.

That distinctive element, original and imaginary, will "tag" your Series in the reader's mind, and they will remember your byline, maybe buy more books.

So here are some of the Posts mentioning Verisimilitude.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-1.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-2.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/06/depiction-part-14-depicting-cultural.html

Here's one about Corporate Greed and the Sex Drive -- involving Pluto transits.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/10/alien-sexuality-part-3-corporate-greed_25.html

And I did say verisimilitude is essential to Theme:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/12/theme-archetype-integration-part-1.html

The HEA is a hard sell to non-Romance readers, which is most of the science fiction readership, so you have to argue convincingly for the verisimilitude of the Happily Ever After ending.  Here is a discussion of that task for the author of Soul Mate romance.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/12/theme-archetype-integration-part-1.html

And Plot Pacing is paramount.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/10/mysteries-of-pacing-part-6-how-to.html

In fact "Pacing" as a writing technique can be the most important thing you learn to do. Pacing can be the genre signature -- which scenes or descriptions you spend pages on, and which you cut to less than 1 sentence.

A long time ago, Romance novels were required to omit sex scenes, and still they captured imagination and fueled determination not to settle for less than a Soul Mate.

Romance novels sans sex still presented Characters with potent Charisma.  You could meet a man whose mere glance would sweep you off your feet.

Love at first sight works like that.  After all, it is "first sight" - presumably not after first sex.

Charisma works like that - instant first-sight attention getting, followed by a riveting hint of potential.

Potential for what depends on the problem confronting the person who notices the charismatic figure.

In the era of the "Talkies," film producers were successful if they could recognize a person with Charisma.  People could learn to act, could be promoted widely, could be "made a Star" -- if only they had Charisma.

Today, Hollywood has learned to fake Charisma, but still those with natural Charisma shine above the rest. Football players, even golfers, tennis stars, Olympic figure skaters, some of the better ones never get the round of endorsements and personal appearances because they don't have Charisma.

Today, the politicians that get the most votes do it with Charisma (fake and real), not Policies.

So in real life, it is useful to understand Charisma.

In Fantasy Life, only the writer has to understand Charisma to create such an attractive Character.

However, with the main product Hollywood is selling being Charisma, mature readers have noticed "it's all a sham."  Everyday readers see the gossamer shimmer of beauty ripped away ("Oh, she is so Botoxed!"), and don't want to buy that product anymore.

Yet, we still feel "seeing is believing."  If we see beauty, are attracted by a voice, an idea, a gesture, we respond, and we don't know why.

Likewise, we see ugliness, a disgusting visage, hear an irritating voice, see unacceptable behavior, and we are genuinely repelled.

That repulsion can be created artificially using Hollywood techniques, the same techniques that create Charisma.

That realization is fluttering around the edges of popular consciousness.  Charisma is real, and powerful, but the mature reader of Romance and of Science Fiction is coming to realize how Charisma is being used as a tool to manipulate their opinions and behaviors.  Nobody likes being "manipulated" but Charisma is sneaky - and only becomes apparent after the action (buying a cosmetic product, voting for the wrong person). 

And so Charisma can be the element a writer uses to create verisimilitude connecting the reader to the fantasy world the writer is just imagining.

As noted above, the Happily Ever After ending is a very hard sell.  Real life experience tells us that infatuation passes -- it isn't love at first sight.  Marriage based on infatuation don't last and break up in real agony.

Infatuation happens when a person first encounters a Charismatic Figure who ignites a deeply personal, individualizing vision of the future.  It's usually sugar coated, but reality teaches us the sugar coating hides the bitter truth.

So with age, and experience, we look at Charismatic figures with leery suspicion.

A teen who finds True Love is viewed as Infatuated.

So we have the "second time around" Romance, when a Relationship can proceed to the HEA, while previously it was blocked by the surface illusion of who the other person really is. 

Infatuation is a small scale version of experiencing Charisma.  The person may not be a Soul Mate, but just connecting with a virgin area of Personality.

We need our infatuations to teach us about ourselves.

Charisma, as used by the media for fiction and non-fiction (yes, top newscaster's get to be top by having Charisma, not just brains), refers to that same lure that infatuates younger people, but instead of affecting just one person, Charisma affects a broad swath of a target audience.

Learning to develop and aim Charisma, to weaponize Charisma (obsessive love) was the shaper of modern civilization.

Those who are the "target audience" of the weapon-wielders armed with Charisma are beginning to understand it is all a sham.  That's why the broadest audience now considers the HEA all a sham.

The HEA happens when Soul Mates form a Couple.

Soul Mates often seem infatuated and obsessive as they work toward forming that Couple and surmounting the current obstacles.

The Romance writer of science fiction, fantasy, or paranormal genres has a unique opportunity to explain Charisma to a readership uniquely suited to understanding that explanation.

The explanation the writer chooses has to be embedded in the Worldbuilding behind the story -- at an invisible level of the structure.  The explanation has to be woven into the theme, not at the assumption level but at the more blatant symbolic level.

Here is the index to theme-symbolism integration:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/02/index-to-theme-symbolism-integration.html

Most writers will have developed several solid explanations for the existence of Charisma, but there are always more to be found.

Here is one way Astrology can explain both the Soul Mate attraction, where each person affects the other charismatically but nobody else sees what she sees in him, and the Public Figure Charisma that moves the body politic.

Infatuation, which has the same effect as being attracted to a Charismatic Figure, is an effect of the planet Neptune and the Sign Pisces which Neptune rules.

Neptune has a blurring or dissolving effect on structure (on reality), but at the same time reveals a "higher truth" or a more real truth that is totally unrealistic but nevertheless true.  The quintessential illustration of the Pisces male is the Engineer.  Think Scotty on ST:Tos.

Obsession is all about Pluto.  Remember Pluto is the "upper octave" of Mars, where Mars creates a bar-brawl scene, Pluto creates World War.  Pluto rules Scorpio, the sign notorious for secret sexual obsessions and even perversions.  It is not the sexuality and love depicted by Venus which is so often paired with Mars. Pluto is the raw staying power of life itself.

Pluto magnifies whatever element it connects to, and so it magnifies Neptune's infatuation effect into full blown Charisma, where life itself depends on cleaving to the glamorous object shrouded in Neptune veils (and thus never what it appears to be.)

The reason understanding of Charisma is so illusive is that Charisma is the product of two difficult to understand forces (symbolized by Astrological planet and sign), Neptune/Pisces and Pluto/Scorpio.

How this works between two individuals, Soul Mates, is how the two Natal Chart positions, aspects, signs, houses, midpoints, of Neptune and Pluto relate to each other, and what transits to the natal charts are in effect during the infatuation.

How it works for whole populations lured into following a Charismatic Figure (sometimes to salvation; sometimes over a cliff) has to do with the Figure's natal chart and transits as they relate to the generational positions of Pluto and Neptune.

The third element that determines how Charisma affects actions (Plot) is the notion of Soul.

Soul is a concept that has to be woven into the worldbuilding. Either souls are real in your fictional world -- or not.  Once you make that choice, you discard one set of themes, and lock into another (maybe a genre, too).  It is a basic choice, and determines which audience (and thus which publisher and which editor) you submit your book to.  For audiences that accept Soul as real in everyday life, you would have to work hard to convince them that Souls are not real in your universe, but Love is real.

So if you opt to build a world where Souls are not real, you eliminate the audience that understands the real world through the concept of Soul.

You would have to convince those readers that a world where humans (or Aliens) have no Soul is better than their world, or can be fixed to be as good as Reality.

That argument generates your Themes.

So Theme and Plot become one via the element of Charisma.

THEME: Souls choose to override the infatuating lure of Charisma and break free of Obsession by using (insert a tool, fictional or not, such as Religion, ESP, Magic Glasses).

THEME: People, humans and Aliens, can not choose to override the infatuating lure of Charisma and so become the hapless victim of Obsession at the behest of their "betters." Kings, Queens, Army Generals, Sorcerers, Moguls, Alien Overlords.

Either theme can be subordinated to the Romance Genre envelope theme of "Love Conquers All."  With or without Soul Mates, Love can muscle through any situation (at least to a HFN ending).

With the Soul Hypothesis, you have an HEA potential, but without Soul, you get a predominance of HFN endings.

Learn what your potential readership knows is real, pick one thing that readership bases their life-decisions on, and incorporate that into your worldbuilding. Be absolutely consistent with that one thing, and let imagination loose for the rest.

In science fiction writing, mix an element your readership knows for a fact is not real with elements they know are real.

Science Fiction is all about "What if ...?"  And basically what goes into the ... of that question is something that is widely known and accepted by all the experts suddenly turning out to be wrong.

Being wrong delights the scientist in the SF reader because finding out what has been wrong brings the "If only ..." of potential happiness into view, and makes the "If this goes on ..." prediction subject to revision for the better.

Being the dynamic force in re-creating your own world is the most fun anyone can have in life.

When the Neptune and Pluto transits bestow life-long, innate Charisma in a person, that Charisma attracts followers simply because the person is having fun living.

Charisma just sits there seething until FUN is added.

Charismatic figures enjoy being the center of attention, which makes them the center of attention.

On the smaller scale, of one-on-one relationships, one person can see an infatuating delight in another and become obsessed by it, joining the Charismatic individual in his obsession.

Being obsessed is actually FUN.  It feels good, which is why people don't struggle to break free until the obsession has almost run its course.

So if Charisma is the topic of your Theme, what it is, where it comes from, why it is good, why it is bad, and whether it is even real or just an insanity of the moment, then you need to introduce your reader to a Character who would enthrall them in real life.

Spock was such a figure for ST:ToS (and still is).  But note how many fans of Star Trek never found Spock interesting -- and instead were obsessed with Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, or even Chekov or Sulu.

Each individual fictional character was Charismatic and obsessive to different segments of the audience.

As the characters interacted with each other, the audiences melded together into a social force to be reckoned with by a Hollywood which had, hitherto, looked down on their victims.

Yes, Hollywood thinking disparaged fans (of anything) because those Execs knew the tricks of artificial Charisma that had fooled those fans.

Knowledge is Power.

The fans learned.  Now the fans rule.  Or do they?

Star Trek created an audience (out of pieces that would never have come together into a social force) using Charismatic Characters.

Study the audiences (fanfic reveals all), then study the Characters, and don't forget to study the writers, the producers, and especially those who supply the money (studios - read the Credits).  Study how Charisma has been used, and find a new way to use it to explain the Happily Ever After is real, and not an ending but a beginning.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Sunday, April 19, 2020

Force Majeure

Force Majeure is a sexy French name for a powerful excuse for failure to perform.  It is much in the news, and is being invoked by major oil companies and very small publishers to welsh on contractual agreements.

"To welsh" is rather a pejorative term, and might also be politically incorrect, as it implies that residents of Wales are synonymous with financial unreliability. No offense toWales or its people or princes is intended here.

Contract Standards publishes a fair definition of Force Majeure.
https://www.contractstandards.com/public/clauses/force-majeure

The Shearman & Sterling legal blog is highly edifying on the burning question of whether or not Covid-19 is a Force Majeure event. Of especial interest is their three-point test of whether or not the critieria for Force Majeure is satisfied.
https://www.shearman.com/perspectives/2020/03/covid-19--force-majeure-event

Could an author who is locked into an unacceptable contract declare Force Majeure because of Covid-19? This author only reads legal and publishing blogs, but if BP can put off purchasing LNG equipment for an entire year (when the market is bad for oil and gas) on the grounds that the pandemic is beyond its control, the pandemic prevents BP from performing, and BP took all reasonable steps to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic on its operations, maybe authors working from home could claim the same, if they wanted to do so.

It's not easy to write at the same time as unplanned home-schooling, or while having to watch adorable ankle biters every second of the waking day.

The Authors Guild has a guide to help those affected by Covid-19
https://www.authorsguild.org/covid-19-resources-for-authors/

Recently, Michael Seidlinger of Publishers Weekly wrote about 15 books and authors hurt by the coronavirus.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/82703-15-books-and-authors-hurt-by-the-coronavirus.html

Book tours are cancelled, book stores are closed, sales are down, allegedly Amazon is giving preference to promoting third party book sales (for which no royalties are paid to authors, of course), and piracy is soaring. Californian freelance authors have even more about which to worry.

Bryan Cave Leighton & Paisner have a very good set of bullet points about Force Majeure and Covid-19, whether one is on the receiving end of a Force Majeure notice, or considering dishing out one.
https://www.bclplaw.com/en-US/thought-leadership/force-majeure-and-covid-19-considerations-for-businesses-in-the-us.html

An author is certainly helpless if under a governor's local executive orders to keep schools closed for the rest of the school year, and to confine everyone to their homes in fortnightly increments.

Foster Swift Collins & Smith PC detail some of the Covid-19 restrictions for those "cabined, cribbed, confined" (Macbeth) in Michigan.
https://www.fosterswift.com/communications-michigan-stay-home-extended-april-30.html

Given the lift to morale that one could get from painting a room --or even an accent wall-- in these S.A.D.times,  it seems particularly cruel that in some places, one may not even buy paint!

All the best,
Rowena Cherry 

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Writers and Their Finances

In the April 2020 LOCUS, Kameron Hurley writes about the difficulties of maintaining a reliable income stream as a freelance author:

The Tricky Finances of the Adjunct Writer

Starting with the unusual problem of several thousand dollars popping up in her bank account from an unknown source, she muses on the balancing act a full-time writer who doesn't produce mega-bestsellers must perform to survive from month to month. She mentions such phenomena as different publishers paying at various intervals and on different dates, royalties received months or years after the publication that earned the income, payments that arrive long after the contract promised they would, and the difficulties of enforcing contracts when their terms aren't fulfilled. Not to mention the impact of that "boom-or-bust cycle" on income taxes. "Trying to explain how writers get paid to anyone outside of the business is difficult, because as you’re saying all this out loud, it sounds absolutely unsustainable and bizarre."

The "hustle," she says, "isn’t about balance. For many of us, the hustle is about survival." Hurley has a day job, which, as she emphasizes, most writers need not only for a reliable income stream but most importantly for health coverage. It was a slight shock to me when I read that half of her monthly Patreon support goes to cover her health insurance and mortgage. My reaction was, "Wow, she receives enough from Patreon every month to equal twice her mortgage and health insurance?!" And yet with that income and proceeds from sales and royalties, she's still struggling. Aside from the first full year after the release of my one Harlequin/Silhouette vampire romance, in my best years I generally earned enough from writing to buy a family dinner out once a month. Maybe twice, in good months.

Fortunately, all my adult life I've enjoyed the kind of support Hurley recommends at one point in her article—a well-employed spouse with excellent health-care coverage (from a thirty-year Navy career, followed by a secure retirement). We have never needed my writing income to live on. That's a good thing, because we would probably be sleeping in the car! Still, sales are gratifying even if one doesn't "need" them, because royalties equal readers, and writers create in order to be read.

Mercedes Lackey often points out that fewer than ten percent of writers make a living from their vocation, and most who do have a nonfiction income source (e.g., journalism, writing ad copy, editing, etc.) as a basis for financial security. Holding a day job doesn't constitute an admission of failure. She advises the aspiring novelist to get qualified in a field for which there's steady demand but which doesn't exhaust one's brain, thus supporting oneself while leaving time and energy for writing. Plumbing, for instance. Marion Zimmer Bradley was fond of reminding young writers, "Nobody told you not to be a plumber."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt